whatchu playing now

HP, in response to yr post about pickups a few days ago, Returnal and Death Stranding are some of my favorites of the past few years, but are going to be a little rough-going to start. Worth sticking with them.

I’ve got flack for sharing this knowledge here before… but shock horror Ghosts is a great podcast game! Blitzing through this history of rock podcast while slicing up mongols, it’s a good time!

I gave Returnal a go with a pirated version on PC and it is tough moving from Kb+M to controller! Think I will stick with it though, I really enjoy and appreciate the game design and aesthetic. I have started DS twice already and yeah, the beginning is rough with all the exposition. Kojima has enough good will with me (MGS2 is my all time fave) thought to keep pushing. Thanks for the recs!

"Plague Tale: Innocence" was pretty by the book, and by that I mean it felt like a YA novel (with some lazy surprise Star Wars tropes tossed in as well). Too much hand-holding as well, in every sense; Hugo was an annoying sibling, and the game explicitly spelled out too many solutions to its modest puzzles and challenges. Still, it had its moments, and I respect any indie game swinging for the AAA fences, even if it fell short of more its polished, more compelling cousins.

^^thanks for the review, seems like a definite skip for me

Ghosts of Tsushima was too mediocre for me. Did not seem to have a ingle new idea. Gameplay was not fun. Just a pretty wallpaper over a done and dusted video game design. Yet saying all this, I am enjoying forbidden west? It is much prettier. It has a unique visual identity (Tsushima was pretty, but boring, forbidden west is pretty and interesting!). The shooting mechanics are fun. The story actually “tries” to do something. Good Lord this Aloy voice actor is exasperating though. Her sigh after every word, absolutely infuriating. Ghosts = open world + nothing new + no variety. Forbidden West = open world + unique identity + much variety.

Playing this game on hard vs Tsushima on normal has probably heavily influenced my opinion too.

Rogue Legacy 2 dropped on PS Plus Extra yesterday so looking forward to spending about 30 hours on it without ever once getting past the first boss.

just broke 200,000 on robotron2084 for the first time. (blue label)

Rogue Legacy sounds like a cool idea, but when I see videos it looks kinda lame & shallow compared to Hollow Knight or something?

I'm playing Sekiro again since I couldn't find anything else to keep my interest, it's a blast so far (mostly because I'm much better at it now than on my original playthrough four years ago).

Started "Signalis," sort of for the second time (I'd played a bit of it with my 13-year old nephew, which was slow going). Nice change of pace from what I'd been playing, though I did forget there was no autosave and accidentally quit it too early and now need to play the (slow) beginning for the third time.

Just got a psvr2 for cheap second hand. Head hurts, brains hurts, not interested, going to sell it on and hopefully make $50 off it (I got it reaaaal cheap). At least I know now, it’s the 2d plain for me!

Bouncing between:

Rogue Legacy 2 (Exactly what I wanted from a sequel, even if I am awful at it)
Lonely Mountains: Downhill (Very chill, very hard)
A Hat in Time (This is too janky to actually enjoy, and I really want to enjoy a mindless 3D collectathon)
Yooka Laylee and the Whatever it's Called (Rock solid 2D platforming, still don't love the overworld stuff)

Might also try Inscryption later, too.

lonely mountains downhill is a masterpiece imo

Creeping through Signalis still, there is no way I could do this without a cheat sheet for the puzzles.

Not unrelated, the combination of puzzles and backtracking and limited storage and math/logic challenges in the map free area (Nowhere?) is kind of starting to really get on my nerves. Get the Wooden Ring and bring it to the alter behind the door that needs the Stone Key that can be found in the Blood Den that can only be opened when you're carrying the Silver Shoes, etc. I know it's old school par for the course, but it's a huge pain in the ass even before you throw in enemies. Almost bad enough to make me stop playing.

Yeah Nowhere was when I broke down and used a guide.

Raft, with friend, played for a week because we started to enjoy the story mode and visiting the larger islands/structures. Well, until they decided to make one of them completely underwater and highly frustrating. mugs.

xpost Even with a guide, and even with the difficulty set to casual, I barely made it through. Honestly, if I didn't know (just from a random spoiler) that this lead to a seamlessly fake ending, I would have just figured, yeah, that's the end, and deleted the game and never thought twice about it. But it's not the end (sigh). Taking a break, regardless.

i've been playing a bunch of ps2 games lately, so time to poll it

ps2 is still the big hole in my gaming knowledge alas. maybe by the time i'm 50 i will have had a chance to try all the good games on there

Started Final Fantasy XIV. Have tried MMO's before, never got it. I think I'm starting to get it..... Lord knows why anyone would play WoW while this exists

akka arrh is as you might expect a complete headfuck but what a delight to be playing a jeff minter game in twenty-oh-three. gridrunner was one of the all time arcade games on a home computer. was less interested in some of the whimsy - i was fairly indifferent to attack of the mutant camels - but these days the aesthetics are positively liberating.

akka arrh, despite being the sound your brain will be making after playing for five minutes, is also a surprisingly playable and enjoyable pick up/put down/drown three hours of your life in sort of game.

I loved attack of the mutant camels and how they stomped along but fair to say it's not up there with gridrunner. My brother says Minter was a creepy mofo and it was an open secret that he did unspeakable things with his llamas! I don't think he did Deus Ex Machina for the c64 and it seemed annoyingly pretentious to 10 yr old me. I can't believe he's only 11 years older than me, he looked like he was in his 30's in the 80's to me.

oh no those poor llamas! and he seemed so benign. distressing.

next time I talk to my brother I'll ask him if he got this info from a reliable source - just in case I'm besmirching the guy! But he is the software writing biz and knows lots of ppl in the industry.

i already believe it #teamllama

Been working through some stuff the last couple weeks:

BABBDI - Short, free (on steam at least) first person platformer/adventure game where you have to escape a abstract brutalist hell city. Recommended.
Sludge Life 2 - the grimy, goofy open-world exploration platformer gets bigger, goes vertical, and adds a cigarette bumming mechanic and not much else. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one, but play SL1 first.
Trombone Champ - Finally "beat" this one. Very fun, very dumb rhythm game with a puerile sense of humor (hope you like seeing poop!) and lots of public domain songs. They keep doing free updates with more tracks, too.
Lonely Mountains: Downhill - Thanks to all the people who recommended this upthread because it fucking rips. I do get annoyed with how often foregrounded tree branches block your vision though.
Balan Wonderworld - Bought this expecting a trainwreck, but I'm kind of enjoying it after a couple hours. Deadly Premonition is maybe my favorite video game of all time though so ymmv.

castlevania: symphony of the night

playing on an emulator on my laptop while on a lonely month-long research/work trip. i bought a little usb controller (shaped like an snes controller). supposedly this game gets very easy at some point but either i'm really bad at it or i'm still at the challenging part. the design is amazing

so happy we love katamari reroll is available. Something about that flower level floods me with endorphins.

flopson: 8bitdo sn30? i have a similar one but the left analog stick broke.

i beat danganronpa v3. funnily i have no interest in the extra modes after these games end, despite doing the personal time/dating sim stuff during the game. will probably finish phoenix wright spirit of justice next.

also playing some dumb idle games listed on galaxy.click

Bought Dave the Diver and played it for a bit tonight. I think I'm going to like this a lot.

A bunch of stuff on my wishlist went on sale, or at least past my comfort-level price point, so I picked up both Teslagrads, Tchia, Dredge and the PS5 version of Night in the Woods. Oh, and Remnant: From the Ashes, whose sequel is imminent and already getting great reviews. The last thing I need is more games, but I feel like I got a rhythm right now that's mostly disrupted by diving into 100+ hour monsters.

flopson: 8bitdo sn30? i have a similar one but the left analog stick broke.

this one looks way cuter and higher quality, might actually cop one, thx for the tip. this is what i bought:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71gFUv3JC5L._AC_SL1500_.jpg

I need a new PS game and don't feel like playing most kinds of games. Might finally try Control?

"Control" does get kinda repetitive, but it's pretty creative and has stuck with me. One section of the game in particular is one of the most memorable sequences of anything I have ever experienced.

Control is the closest to a "normal" game that also feels like a mood piece that I've played. I was very bad at it and didn't love constantly hearing gun noises, but it's really aesthetically engaging

It's either that or Hitman I think. Everything else seems too slow or too frenetic, or too story-driven and long.

Yeah maybe Hitman would be a good pace for some convalescence. Every time I see videos of Control there's so much running and shooting. Vibey shooting I'm sure, but still.

Hitman is an absolute blast. It's basically like a methodical coyote/roadrunner cartoon where you are playing as both at once.

Busted out the original MYST on my steam deck for some midnight gaming in bed last night. Perfect environment for it. A beautiful game, keen to unravel the mystery.

Ok I splurged on Hitman and spent all day playing, got through the Paris & Italy missions. It's a lot of fun, though I feel like I'm not playing it as creatively or wackily as I could be. There was an exploding golf ball though.

It took me forever in Italy to realize I needed to leave the mansion compound and go on a scavenger hunt to find the lab entrance.

The best way to explore the creative stuff, imo, is to trigger some of the specific missions, which basically walk you through the most Rube Goldbergy stuff. But I learned quickly that there really is no wrong way to play. If you come across a target and see a window, by all means, just shoot them (if you can get away with it). But the convoluted stuff is the most sadistically satisfying, especially in the Colorado level, iirc. But all of them, really. The AI and writing is really sharp, and at its core there's something really fun about attacking someone with a cheeseburger.

I want to say there's a particularly good Dunkey Hitman video, he's really good at doing the right wrong things (and vice versa).

Current rotation: Elden Ring, Disco Elysium, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Zelda, Trackmania, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Exoprimal, and Dave the Diver.

god bless unemployment

finishing up Zelda, doing all the quests I was supposed to do earlier that were clearly signposted but I wandered off on my own. which was a bit of a mistake as I now have new powers/equipment upgrades that would have come in real handy at points. oh well I had fun exploring anyway!

oh and I've been playing a few rounds of Super Video Golf which scratches that itch for a quick round of retro golf, including low poly trees, 3 button press controls and low bitrate audio samples.

Can't stop slaying spires, pls send help.

haha yeh that game is addictive, think I played 40+ hours of it in one week

Did another Hitman 3 level, and while the game itself is great there are lots of weird things about the scaffolding of the game that drive me crazy.

Like, there's no main menu option to just continue where you left off, just to load previous saves or do a bunch of weird alternate campaigns or modes that I don't want to mess with yet.

And when you finish a mission, it apparently doesn't create a save at that point? You can only load a previous save our move on to the next mission. But if you exit to the main menu at that point, you need to finish the previous mission from your last save.

I only noticed this because the internet went out during a storm and I played the rest of the level offline. But now I apparently have to play the *entire rest of the game* offline, because I'm always continuing from an offline save? Even if I start a new level and save, then go online from the main menu, it forces me offline to continue.

Not that it matters since it doesn't affect gameplay, it's just dumb. Let me know if I'm being an idiot about this.

I didn't know you could play offline! I thought it was one of those games that required an internet connection, for some reason.

Not entirely unrelated, I decided to go back to Signalis and pick up where the fake ending left off, and the fucking game had bumped me back to the tail end of Nowhere. Fuck that, see you later, Signalis, it was nice meeting you.

It just doesn't give you experience points or ratings/achievements. But the xp must just be some leaderboard shit, without in-game ramifications (I wasn't sure before).

re 8bitdo controllers

as someone who now owns too many of these, i prefer the pro to the sn30 slightly. they are both good tho. a pro (or pro 2? i can't remember) + an m30 (the sega-style 6-button) are in heavy rotation, the sn30 i use less these days. wish i had been able to find the m30 in the cure colorway (japanese saturn style i think?) but i just got the genesis black one

if feeling like a real super nintendo controller is your main want tho, the sn30 absolutely feels like one, only real differences are a couple of extra buttons + it doesn't feel worn from 30 years of white knuckle un squadronning

anyway i just realized what thread this is so i will say JAGGED ALLIANCE 3

beat it once and immediately started playing it again. can't remember the last time i did this. long time coming for a real sequel to one of my fave games of all time. by jove, they did it. they really did it